Whether You Fall
by marine cathedral
Summary: Vesper Lynd is a moth. James Bond is a flame. And not even death can keep her away from him. Post-Casino Royale, finally complete, rewritten, reposting.
1. 001

_If I don't make it, know that_  
_I loved you all along_  
_Just like sunny days that_  
_We ignore because_  
_We're all dumb and jaded_  
—Our Lady Peace, "4 AM"

**WHETHER YOU FALL**

**001**

When Vesper Lynd was a child, she loved watching the birds from the fourth story window of her bedroom in the orphanage.

She was always wondering things—silly things, according to the other girls—such as what it would have been like to be a bird, to be pushed from the nest and still know how to fly. Opening the windows was forbidden, as the orphanage workers feared a fall (worse: a fall on purpose), but upon occasion she slipped the latch from its hook and pushed against the resistance of the rusted hinges, stuck her head out, and flew on borrowed wings.

It didn't matter that they were pigeons. She wasn't greedy. Beggars, as she and her orphanage mates were often reminded, could not afford to be choosers.

The birds were bright, never you mind the dull gray of their feathers. No matter how she tried to coax them into the fourth floor of the orphanage, with bits of stale bread she'd nabbed from the mess hall (true to its name, it was _not_ a cafeteria) or birdlike ululations, they wouldn't fall for it. No bird was stupid enough to set foot into that orphanage. Doubtless, she thought, that was why they'd been born with wings, and she hadn't.

But once upon an autumn day, as the leaves died and took all the color in the world with them, a bird crashed into the fourth story window of the orphanage bedroom Vesper shared with five other girls. The others, affecting the worldly air of girls twice their ages, didn't look up from months-old copies of girl magazines like _Cosmopolitan_ and _Glamour_ and _Vogue_. (Vesper looked on them in disdain; they were, like her, barely out of training brassieres.)

Without a thought she rushed down four flights of stairs, slipped out the door in the kitchen, and went in search of the bird. She pondered broken wings and how to fix them; she imagined herself as a brunette Sleeping Beauty or a long-haired Snow White, singing with her constant bird companions. Maybe more would come, and she'd nurse them back to health too, and they'd be faithful only to her; maybe they'd teach her how to grow wings. Maybe they'd all fly away from here.

When she found the spot, precisely beneath the fourth story window of her bedroom in the orphanage, where she figured it had landed, she found the bird dead. Vesper Lynd learned a hard lesson that autumn day, when leaves died and took birds with them: that this was life. A fourth story window. Falling. Broken wings.

A cage, looking for a bird.

—

It is an ingenious idea, if only because it plays devil's advocate to everything M has ever believed about taking chances; about well-laid plans, and good intentions, and paving the road to hell.

MI6 has decided to hide her in the open.

She lives in London, still. She works for Her Majesty's Treasury, still; she has gotten a pay raise and a very handsome settlement from the government. Death benefits, she chuckles in darker moments, death benefits because Vesper Lynd has died, and the government means to compensate her for the loss.

Everything is water now. There is nothing that is not painted in shades of blue.

She lives across town from the old apartment she shared with Yusef. It is nicer, thanks to the government's money, but she does not keep cats anymore and she did not go home to retrieve her vinyl collection, her library, her feline companion, or her clothes. The re-configured deal with Quantum, which had been meant to save James Bond's life instead of Yusef's, was not the only gossamer wisp of the tangled webs Vesper Lynd had reweaved in her last days.

What that means is that he's got her cat. Or maybe not. Either way, it is not hers, and she doesn't stop to think that willing most of her worldly belongings to him might have been one more cruel decision in a string of them. But if not him, then whom?

Sophie Grey does not own a cat. Sophie Grey does not resent that she has been moved to a new office. Sophie Grey has blonde hair and brown contacts and her Treasury co-workers are not stupid enough to slip up and call her by that other name.

In essence, everyone lies.

Sophie Grey wears girly things which Vesper Lynd (ha) wouldn't have been caught dead in, and it isn't because Vesper Lynd resents what James Bond said, so long ago it seems like a dream: about overcompensating, and insecurity. Vesper Lynd is dead, and Sophie Grey does not need to overcompensate because she is not insecure.

Neither does she wonder what James would say about her newfound sense of style, because Sophie Grey has never met him, never loved him, never died to atone for betraying him.

—

She has painted two walls of the kitchen the color of his eyes, and the other two are painted stark white so that no one can accuse her of favoritism.

Sometimes men in black SUVs drive by her house late at night, when she is still up nursing her third glass of wine; she recognizes them, too, in the lift on the way up to her office. Once she thought she'd seen an agent, conspicuous for his expensive suit and stiff face and generic good looks, trailing her in the supermarket.

So kind of M, not to have forgotten her.

She goes to work and she comes home to an apartment which is spacious but barren, the walls of which she has painted in shades of blue, only because she can't stop drowning. Sophie Grey believes in poetic justice.

Because she is dead, Vesper Lynd believes in nothing at all.


	2. 002

Warning: please feel free to skip the first section, as it's a bit gory.

* * *

_I do this thing where I think I'm real sick  
But I won't go to the doctor to find out about it  
Because they make you stay real still  
In a real small space  
As they chart up your insides and put them on display_

_They'd see all of it, all of me, all of it—_

_All of the good that won't come out of me_  
_And all the stupid lies I hide behind_  
—Rilo Kiley, "The Good That Won't Come Out"

**WHETHER YOU FALL**

**002**

Sophie Grey does not know what to do when the baby comes.

Showers and blood-stained hands and the wet absolution of his mouth are at the forefront of her thoughts; the waterfront villa and the beach and the rocking motions of making love on a boat come after; and then an elevator, and her doom in his blue eyes.

Water. Flux, change, flow. Easy come, easy go.

It is a strange sensation, like the beginning of a period. Something like tearing, and blood, yes, and clots that she doesn't dare investigate too closely, and the gurgle of the hungry shower drain. When the cramps come she slides down the wet ocean-blue of the shower wall and sits, naked legs hugged to her chest, the fingers of one hand in her mouth, stifling the cries of the wounded animal inside her.

If she had lost something else he'd given her, like a valued book or a precious bit of jewelry, the pain would have felt the same. Vesper had never been clumsy with gifts, having realized the value and scarcity of generosity from a young age; perhaps Sophie takes things for granted. But his arm is not around her and he can't wash the blood away because he isn't there, and doesn't know, and would think she deserved it, anyway.

The bitch is dead, Sophie thinks.

Vesper just cries.

—

They look at her with wary eyes, her coworkers, in the weeks after she comes back from Montenegro. She doesn't try, anymore, to bait the moronic crowd of men around the coffee pot with fiery feminist rhetoric—she stays to herself, quiet, absent one charmingly exotic necklace about which her female coworkers constantly ribbed her.

There are more important people about which to speculate, now. Who she's trying to fool, or why, is anyone's guess. And they all think she looked better as a smoldering brunette with banked fires in her eyes, anyway.

—

Once, there was a time when Vesper would have spent a considerable portion of her salary on museum admittance or shows on the West End. Now, it's the park or book stores or public art galleries. Sophie takes her pleasures cheaply.

In the park, young twenty-somethings sitting side-by-side on a bench some distance away. They've got copies of the same textbook spread on their laps, but she's leaning over his lap and pointing, angling her head in such a way that her hair waterfalls over her shoulder, and even at this distance Sophie sees his eyes deviate from the text, wander to her neck. Can see with a hawk's eyes the flare of his nostrils as he takes in the girl's perfume wafting on the breeze.

He leans in for a quick kiss, landing sloppily on the border of her hairline and her cheek, and she pushes him away even as her laughter entices him closer. _Idiot_, Vesper wants to scream, _don't, you think you're so _young_ but you're dying a little every day_, but Vesper's mouth is still full of Venetian water and she's so far down no one could hear her, anyway. Sophie shifts uncomfortably on the bench, crossing her legs tighter against the nippy breeze; pretends that the scene with the young lovers doesn't make her feel lecherous and vile and dazed with longing all at once.

Sophie bets that he brings candy to her dormitory, and she lectures him fondly not to wash his dark colors with his whites, and she wonders if James Bond was the candy type or the bouquet type before standing hurriedly, abruptly, and walking off, as fast as her snappy heels can carry her.

Another time, then. The same park, the same bench. Spring is tempestuous in London, and the breeze is nippier and she's carrying an umbrella, folded neatly into her bag. A couple passes by, and they've got a baby carriage. The man pushes the carriage with one hand, and his other arm pulls the mother of his child closer, and Sophie winces, blinking rapidly.

Only because it's such a sweet little picture, she tells herself, as her hand wipes at her eyes and comes back black-streaked with mascara. Only because divorce rates are so high, and they look so in love—

It's a wonder anyone makes it, after all.

Another day, and she's watching a homeless woman pick up aluminum cans and put them into a shopping cart. She's dressed in rags, and old enough to be Sophie's mother, and she wonders what it's like to walk around these unfriendly streets with no identity and no one to care. A homeless person, she thinks, may as well be dead, too.

"Excuse me, ma'am," Sophie murmurs, far more deferentially than Vesper might have. But one had to wonder if Vesper would have even taken the time. "I was wondering if you'd like to join me for coffee and a bite to eat."

But she's carrying a leather satchel, and her skirt suit has the cut of a respectable designer. The woman turns to Sophie Grey, apoplectic. "I don't need your charity, missy!" she rails. "I don't need your coffee!"

She and her shopping cart rattle off, and Sophie Grey stands there, at a loss, as the threatening clouds make good on their promise and open up.


	3. 003

_She tied you to a kitchen chair  
__She broke your throne, she cut your hair  
__And from your lips she drew the hallelujah  
_—Rufus Wainwright, "Hallelujah"

**WHETHER YOU FALL**

**003**

She stands on a mezzanine that overlooks a ballroom, wearing silk, wishing for a cool breeze. Beneath her, SIS employees celebrate in tasteful decadence. Because they may die tomorrow, M feels it permissible to spoil them today. Social gatherings for spies: who would have thought?

M stands at her side, in an elegant dress of dark, crushed velvet. They pretend to watch the revelers, together. M is the first to break the silence. When she does, she does not look at the blonde woman at her side.

"I didn't think you'd show up."

"I'm full of surprises," she responds, tone vacant, voyeuristic eyes focused downward.

"I hope not," M says, and there is something sharp in her voice, like broken wine bottles. "You are in no position to be full of surprises."

It is a warning, or a threat, and they both know it. Sophie inclines her head, and a pin glitters in the low light of the ballroom against the sleek up-sweep of her hair. "Of course," she concedes without heat.

"You'll have to leave, of course." M folds her hands together as she leans against the balustrade. Her posture is ramrod perfect, the posture of someone who second-guesses herself only rarely. "I don't know what fool let you in, but I'll deal with them accordingly. You weren't even to know of tonight's festivities."

Sophie says nothing for a long time. She watches below, the way women's heads turn toward him. He is Bond tonight, not James. The arrogant lift of his chin tells her so. There's a faint cut above his left eyebrow, close to the hairline, something she would not have been able to make out were it not for the vivid red of it against his skin. He is stiff when he moves, and she swallows a gulp of worry.

"You wouldn't want a scene, would you?" she asks.

M pauses, and turns to her for the first time, taking her measure of this slim, pale woman. She is smaller than she was in Vienna, when M had stood at her bedside and pronounced damnation as her judgment, and she looks better as a blonde than any brunette has a right to. M imagines she wears her lies close to her, like a second skin. She has the look of a woman who sees her death in her dreams every night.

"One would think you capable of showing gratitude, at least," she responds at last. There is nothing of her thoughts in her voice: no curiosity, no pity. "If it wasn't for me, you'd be doing your part in contributing to the marine food chain under Venice by now."

"Then you should have put me down like any other bad dog, M." Sophie turns to her, brown eyes narrowed, temper piqued at long last. "Better dead than this."

"I did not save you because I felt you had any intrinsic worth," comes the swift response. "I saved you because you are a useful asset to MI6, and because your feelings for 007 will keep your easily-swayed heart loyal, and because you are better off in our hands than in the hands of our enemies, who have already proven they know how to manipulate you. You vindicated yourself to MI6 only at the eleventh hour. Of course I have sung dead Vesper's praises to him over these months, anything to ease whatever it is he's feeling." She shrugs. "We need him. But he doesn't need you. See? And he won't forgive you, either. You have no purpose here, and your only power is destructive. You may as well be a ghost, a malevolent spirit that doesn't know how to rest."

Sophie's ire is almost too waterlogged to dredge back up, but she manages, for a moment only. "Spare me your Oedipal longings, M. You have no idea why I'm here."

M rolls her eyes and watches Bond lean down to peck the cheek of the blonde he's with. He excuses himself to the bar, every movement economical, designed to maximize output. "I wonder if _you_ have any idea." Her voice is dry.

Sophie watches him, too, eyes inscrutable. She murmurs the words in time with his lips: three measures of Gordon's, one of vodka...

_"Because of the bitter aftertaste?" she'd asked him, disbelieving and more than a little amused. He was riding high on his victory, _couldn't _stop smiling, and it was infectious even if she'd never admitted it to his face._

_ "No," he'd said, "because once you've tasted it..."_

She glances down, at her hand, at the martini glass in it, and then back up to him. "It's all you want to drink," Vesper whispers.

M turns to her, her eyes narrowed. Sophie watches the scene below, expression bland, inscrutable again.

Bond turns, surveying the room with characteristic spy-ease. She is not so bland and inscrutable, though, when his eyes lift to the mezzanine and pass over her.

She releases the breath she wasn't aware she was holding. His eyes return to the spot, a little incredulous. She has already hidden behind the nearby Grecian column, her own eyes closed, imagining the flare of crystalline blue. When she opens her eyes, she sees M nod to someone below, maybe Bond himself.

M sees Sophie's white knuckles wrapped around the Vesper martini and shakes her head, indicating that the crisis has passed. Bond has moved on, his own Vesper martini in hand.

"Dropping little hints, I see," she says. "But I'd advise against it. Useful asset you may be, but this zero-sum game cannot go on indefinitely. Neither MI6 nor I have any qualms with putting you back beneath the Venetian lagoon if you prove to be more liability than asset." She shakes her head, and stares off into the middle distance. "Christ," she mutters in a heavy voice, "I really _do_ miss the Cold War."


	4. 004

_"I'm sorry for my inability to let unimportant things go, for my inability to hold on to the important things." — _Jonathan Safran Foer

**WHETHER YOU FALL**

**004**

When Sophie receives a dossier in the mail that contains the damning evidence of Yusef's betrayal, she understands that the news is punishment for her audacity in attending the SIS black-tie do. M's cruelty masquerades as kindness, and also serves as a warning, a warning for so many things that she does not bother to make a list. Inside her head, love-knots unravel, and she touches the empty space where her collarbones kiss.

It is not to say she misses the man, or even the necklace, though both comprised so much of her identity for so long. He was everything she had wanted or wanted to be: a kind, sensitive artistic soul who smelled like charcoal and loved like a blank canvas, that boundless and that empty, who was company for a lonely heart afraid of facing the night alone but even more afraid of facing it with someone else. An artist who never sold a painting, who did nothing but curse at fickle muses and exchange hisses with her cat.

She hadn't loved him, which makes his betrayal worse, because there is no gentleness of prior emotion to temper the anger and humiliation that she feels now.

Safety was the drug Vesper Lynd overdosed on, and asceticism was her decadent indulgence.

Sophie, though: Sophie overdoses on lack. She has nothing: miles and miles of it.

—

Sophie Grey passes a hair salon every day, and today she stares at it from across the busy street like it's about to bite her. And it just might, too—she has tried to ignore it for so long. In the end, she can't resist, and walks in after work that day.

Isn't it ridiculous to give so much credence to that old-fashioned idea that ties together, so inextricably, a woman's identity to her hair? But the more she has lost, the more she has been reborn. Afterward, she trashes the doe-eyed contacts in a coffee shop bathroom. Sophie walks in and Vesper Lynd walks out.

In every reflecting surface she passes on the way home, Vesper Lynd smiles at her and she smiles back.

Vesper is learning, now: home, sometimes, is a choice you make.

—

When M hears, she gives Vesper a tongue-lashing using the kind of tone fit to peel wallpaper from the walls. _Irresponsible, unbelievable, hard-headed, every bit as brassy as before! Has death taught you nothing? What can you hope to accomplish with this—this—completely _impotent_ show of rebellion? Do you think going back to brunette is going to change your life? You've only endangered it! We don't know who is still looking for you, and allowing you as much leeway as you've had before was a show of kindness you didn't truly deserve!_

And, quieter: _Playing Cinderella with hair color rather than glass slippers. You're a fool._

Vesper calls her bluff. It's a trick she learned from James, a trick she'll take to her second grave since she took nothing to her first she'd want to build a legacy upon. Not even when M threatens to send her to South Africa, to rural parts of eastern Europe, does she waver. Not even when she asks, demands, her real name back and is mercilessly denied.

Yielding is not an option.

She's still squinting from the sunlight, because it is much stronger here on the surface rather than down in the canal depths; but she's getting her land-legs back and that's air in her lungs rather than Venetian water. She gives Sophie Grey a merciful death one night, lighting candles and even saying a quirky little prayer, wine-drunk and looking forward to tomorrow for the first time in ages.

And she knows what comes next. She knows, even if it is only a faint possibility lingering at the back of her mind. Vesper now sees hidden faces of the stars, the stars that have turned their backs on her for so long; and the ghostly breath of what-could-have-been and what-may-yet-be as it breathes down her neck like a long-lost lover. In the space of time that has lapsed since that night in the ballroom, M at her side and James Bond below, she has gone into the cocoon a caterpillar and emerged—well, Vesper Lynd was never a butterfly—

But maybe you don't have to be a butterfly, or a bird, to grow wings. Or to deserve them.

It is too bad that Vesper does not see the broken glass of her window when she comes home weeks later, nor the moving shadows alongside the stationary ones. When she does notice, they are already on her.


	5. 005

This chapter contains violent content. Please proceed with caution.

_Does it piss you off  
__That you're not waterproof?  
_— Tracy Bonham, "Whether You Fall"

**WHETHER YOU FALL**

**005**

Everything she has ever loved leaves her in this place.

Open spaces, the comfort of cats (even if only a memory, because they are not hers now), good wine, French singers, thoughtful art. James Bond. The comfort of living inside a trusted flesh in a world where trust is dubious at best and a fallacy beyond that first fatal misconception.

Breaking her body is an afterthought. It is her mind they are after. Which is too bad, because after the first few hours, her mind is the first thing to go.

They are kind in the beginning. They tell her they want to be her friend. MI6 is a common enemy. _Help us, and we'll help you. They took your life away from you, your love!_ They promise rewards, riches, protection. A place within Quantum with her name—her real name—on it.

And she is attractive. This does not hurt. People like to play with pretty things, but the problem is, they only play with it up until the point they break it. Desire, Vesper knows, is ultimately annihilating.

Laws of nature work actively against bodily integrity. Things come apart when pulled too hard. Some of the body's materiality is too soft to withstand an impact harsher than, say, the blow of a hammer against the spun sugar of Vesper Lynd's bones. They like the way she sings when she is in pain, especially as time reveals her refusal to talk. They like to see how far they can push her up the octave scale before her voice breaks, too.

—

A scream, phlegm flecking white and wet on her cheek.

"Is that his real name? _James Bond_?"

A grunt, whimpered shriek, trapped behind the prison bars her teeth have become.

"And hers? M? Her name, now!"

Teeth chattering, prison bars rattling: his only answer. She has moved beyond shock, drifting in a livid haze, so it must just be the cold.

As if M would ever trust her with anything beyond MI6's obsession with dubious initials! She hadn't even trusted Vesper with her own name.

"Answer me!" His hand draws back, the nauseating rocking motion stops, and when it connects with her mouth blood flies and she comes back to herself, for a moment only. Dingy, exposed light bulb; shadows along the wall which might be the others but it is only a quantitative difference, really. A long, thin, sharp-ended iron poker smolders nearby, but she has nothing to fear from it for the moment. Quantum is startling in its consistency.

There isn't even lust in his eyes. She is spared the indignity of true desire. It is just business, and there are more interesting ways to torture a woman than your standard violent fare.

"_Fuck you_," she shrills.

His smile is impersonal. "Thank you for the invitation," he says politely, and she descends into madness again.

—

They want _him_, of course. Not in the same way she does. It is something which comes to her mind only later, bubbling up like a bloated dead body returning to the surface of a murky, watery grave. She is a means to an end, maybe the end of his life. Because she is valuable only as long as she remains silent, because potential and profit hide somewhere in the mysterious connection between her memory and her voice box, and because it is hard to gauge how valuable she truly is to M, to MI6. Who can afford to let her live? To whom is she a loose end needing to be tied off, and why, and what part does she have to play in the international drama which is two parts James Bond's sex appeal and five parts his penchant for making personal enemies out of professional ones?

They can all go to hell for all she's concerned about them, though at times it entertains her to play with ideas such as: just how much M would pay to have her back in one piece (ambiguous, as M despises her); how much force M would expend to save her life (dubious as well, because MI6 is well known for cutting even their own loyal agents loose in the event of a capture, and she is not well-loved within that venerable institution); and why she even bothers to ponder such fantastical thoughts of rescue after all.

There is no fairytale white horse waiting outside for her. There is no prince with sword or gun. Hell, she doesn't even know where she is. Vesper Lynd is the ugly side of the Cinderella myth, what happens when there is no one to miss you when you are gone, when all your favors are cashed in and then some, and all you are left with is fevered dreams of gossamer nothingness.

Before James, Vesper had been all about being her own prince, because the only person who cared enough about her to set her free was herself.

He's ruined her. Damn him.

—

They leave her alone for long intervals, as alone as one can be when the walls skitter with red eyes and hungry feet, doubtless as much to stew in her own agony as in plotting what to do with her next. She is a most recalcitrant guest, and she can tell they are getting tired of her.

There is nothing inside Vesper Lynd (again), and so there won't be much of a payoff.

Perhaps a bullet to the head, she ponders lazily, slumped against the cold wall, naked form huddled in on itself to preserve what little warmth they've left inside her. Perhaps a bullet to the head, swift and merciful. Or something more vicious, something to send her off into the abyss knowing just how angry they get when they don't get what they want.

Just a word or two could save her. She knows things, because she has a privileged gaze: she's seen bank rolls, and she knows passcodes, and even the real names of a few double-o agents. She knows the names of people heavily involved with recreating personas for people like her, who don't deserve their old ones because either they or someone else fucked up big time.

Maybe they'll send her in little pieces back to SIS headquarters, care of James Bond. She titters, delirious, and the rats echo her. They are every bit as amused as she.

But, yes, M called it. Her loyalty is cemented, for better or for worse, and her greatest concern is the distant, _so_ distant, possibility that M will call out her greatest weapon, her blunt instrument, to retrieve the errant, problematic accountant and bring her home.

Distant, yes. The entire point is not to let him know she is alive. Though, for all intents and purposes, she may not be alive for long.

Would it ease the considerable burden on M's shoulders? Would she breathe a sigh of relief?

All Vesper has for company is rats and men, both with red eyes and grubby hands and relentless hunger, and all her fears, all her regrets, everything which has ever mattered in the deep dark pit of her nightmares finds its way back to the forefront of her consciousness here.

And this is the primary fear, of course. She'd only just gotten herself back, after all. Not even Quantum has the power of James Bond, to make or break her world with a sweep of his crystal eyes.

If given two options, grisly death and James Bond as her retriever, the choice she'd make would be so easy as to be no choice at all.


	6. 006

_Driven by the strangle of vein  
__Showing no mercy, I'd do it again  
__Open up your eyes  
__You keep on crying, baby, I'll bleed you dry  
__Skies are blinking at me  
__I see a storm bubbling up from the seas_

_And it's coming closer  
_— "Closer," Kings of Leon

**WHETHER YOU FALL**

**006**

Inside her cell, she leans against the cold bars, and where the metal touches her it bring goosebumps. They've raised the temperature, again; after a few sweltering hours they'll drop it below freezing, but she doesn't care. There is a thing—an animal—inside her that will not die, not even when she begs for it.

She suspects infection has set in, perhaps the deep welts on her back, perhaps the ragged stubs of her fingernails where she has clawed in protest of the bite of other things into her soft woman's flesh, perhaps the suspicious rattling in her chest when she tries to draw in air.

The place rattles and bangs around her, metal bars and floors and ceilings and inadequate lighting and other cells to the left and the right of her. In lucid moments she wonders how many of her eight remaining lives she will waste in this place.

Having lived a life that has etched its stresses into his face, having chafed against the monotonous burden of his duties bearing down on his Atlas shoulders, no, he still would not have given in. He would not have sunk to the depths of this kind of despair. He would have figured a way out of the handcuffs. He would have known the right things to look for: structural weaknesses, tactical blunders. But she is bleeding, and she is hurting, and she has no particular great strength; only an unwanted talent for survival, which even the lowliest cockroach knows.

—

The metal door at the end of the long, narrow hallway bangs against the wall, and she jerks violently into consciousness, the animal inside her scrabbling and snarling, a rabid sound that nonetheless does not pass her bruised lips.

She slides back into the farthest corner, her oozing, naked back pressed against the cool metal she can no longer feel. If they are coming for her, let them come.

As she listens through the delirium, she hears their footsteps, thudding in time to the heartbeat echoing inside her head, and the dragging sound of a body that refuses to cooperate. It is too loud and she cranes her neck, pressing first one ear and then the other against its corresponding shoulder, seeking silence. The cell beside hers clangs once, protesting its forceful opening, and the sound of a body's dead weight hitting the floor is enough to turn her stomach.

—

"Ms. Grey," comes the voice, hoarse but unmistakable. For a while, she is lost in thought, wondering who Ms. Grey is.

"James," she murmurs, finally, and his name emerges distorted from her savaged throat.

She begins shivering in earnest.

—

"Ms. Grey," comes the voice again, sometime later, stronger now though no less hoarse than when he spoke the first time. She claws her way up, up, up from the madness, realizing that this is no dream. Step by step, up the twisted, barbed staircase of her mind, she climbs. He is an arm's length away. She squints into the darkness and cannot see through the reddish haze of the inadequate light bulbs, but she knows he is there. The darkness is full of him.

Her voice is nearly gone, her throat torn to ribbons, but she answers his call. "Y-yes," she croaks.

He says, "I am going to get you out of here," and his voice is so very soft. Because he is worried for her? For himself? Because he is going to kill her when they escape?

And she has no doubt that they will escape. Nothing stands in the way of James Bond when he has a rendezvous with revenge.

"Finally," she whispers.

—

Time is indeterminate, but she recalls flashes: the rapport of gunfire, shouting, his arms muscling her through the fray, bent low over her to deflect bullets whizzing like angry bees. Or perhaps that is the buzz in her skull. The roar of an engine, the ricochet of bullets against metal more fragile than she would have first supposed. Happy to slip in and out of consciousness, she drifts through the murky reddish haze which has followed her from her cell.

Vesper Lynd awakens in a hospital, and it is an unpleasant awakening. Everything is stark white and cool, unforgiving blue, and she aches with the lethargy of the deeply drugged. She supposes that she is in England again, given the accents of the nurses, and imagines that it is a private hospital for SIS use, given M's eventual presence. The woman, cool and untouchable in a steel gray suit, watches Vesper's rumpled, bedridden form from the doorway. She seems to have aged years.

M opens her mouth to speak, and is duly interrupted by the faint fluttering sounds of nurses' soft shoes on the tiled floor. Along with them comes the sound of heavier, more measured treads, and tired through to the follicles as she is, the hair on the back of her neck still finds the strength to rise. M does not turn to acknowledge James Bond's presence, though her lips thin and eyebrows pull together.

He stands behind M as though Vesper were not lying in a hospital bed a few feet away, immeasurably large eyes watching him through the pain medication and the rising moisture she swipes ineffectually away. As though it were indeed Sophie Grey in the hospital bed, benign and unknown.

A thick cloth bandage peeks from the collar of his shirt. His Atlas shoulders, Vesper thinks mournfully.

"Well," M remarks blandly, "this is rather awkward."

But the explosion does not come. If only he would lash out in the way that both she and M expect, but James does not explode, not in any tangible way. He is standing, head cocked to the side, framed by the doorway and towering over the diminutive M. Behind him, she can see nurses watching speculatively, tracing the long, broad lines of his body.

And then his eyes meet hers, and it knocks the wind from her damaged lungs. She wilts, cowering into the hospital pillow. Though the planes of his face do not shift to reveal an iota of emotion, she imagines that he is gratified by her fear.

This same man, capable of killing with a flick of his wrist, twice her size, who had once taken such pains not to crush her beneath him.

"Don't be foolish, M." He is already poised to turn away. "I promised you Sophie Grey, and here she is."

His eyes are so blue, she thinks. The sensation of drowning is bittersweet and familiar.


End file.
